Board meetings ... forums are still going strong as a convergence point for music fans.
Composite: INTERFOTO / Alamy

Back in the 00s, I ran an online music forum, most of whose regulars were bored office workers. Once, we made a sketchy calculation, based on rates of posting and average wages, of how much the site had cost the UK economy in terms of time wasted arguing about Daft Punk, Outkast, Britney and more. We estimated that around £1.7m of productivity had been gloriously frittered.

Music attracts conversation like a magnet pulls iron filings, and the form that talk takes changes according to where music lovers hang out with one another. Milk bars in the 50s; “head shops”, fuggy student digs and record stores in the 60s and 70s; fanzines in the 80s and 90s. These days, the word gets spread via memes, like those earnest pleas for 10 Facebook friends to share their favourite teenage albums. And in the early 00s, there were music forums: Drowned in Sound, my own I Love Music, Barbelith, Dissensus, Hipinion and dozens of others, fierce little enclaves of snark, in-jokes and bubbling enthusiasm.

Niche area … A and D of patten, the electronic duo behind new music discussion forum 555-5555. Photograph: Patten, courtesy of 555-5555

Starting a music forum in 2018 feels like a quixotic endeavour. But the London-based electronic duo patten have done just that. Their 555-5555 messageboard shares its name with the alias they use for other creative side projects – zines, club nights and the like. They saw a niche for serious music chat that the current social landscape, for all its advantages, wasn’t truly filling. According to patten, there has been a surge of interest in their new board, and an impressive level of quality to the discussion: “Feels like it was something a lot of people were waiting for, maybe without realising it.”

Patten’s new posters have been bitten by a powerful bug. For their regular patrons, these forums existed in that familiar internet interzone where distraction shades into obsession with every new refresh. But for all the passion and energy invested in them, the termite activity of music forums rarely breaks into the consciousness of non-participating fans, let alone the wider public. In 2017, Jared O’Mara, a newly elected Labour MP, found himself in trouble over crass jokes he’d made on the Drowned in Sound messageboard over a decade before. O’Mara’s comments – jokes about having an orgy with members of Girls Aloud and the idea of Jamie Cullum being sexually assaulted by his piano – were nasty but hardly unusual: music boards were riddled with insecure young guys trying to be outrageous.

Mostly, forums mattered not because of what was said on them but because of what they were: places for fans to gather before Facebook and its imitators co-opted the very idea of being “social” online. The rise and decline of music forums offers a miniature of every strain of online conversation, and the optimism and naivety of the people who thought starting those conversations was worthwhile.

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There was plenty of music discussion on the 80s and 90s internet, mostly on mailing lists devoted to individual bands, and on the sprawling newsgroup network of Usenet. Mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups each had distinct advantages. Lists were focused; their membership could be policed and off-topic infractions punished. But they were hermetic places – gated communities that weren’t always friendly to newcomers or easy to find.

Newsgroups had the opposite issues. They were porous, endlessly divertable by gleeful troll invasions and crossposting – publishing the same thread on multiple newsgroups, often in wickedly bad faith. A 1997 thread about the Prodigy’s Smack My Bitch Up landed on the band’s own newsgroup, on UK and US alternative music newsgroups, on electronica newsgroups, and on politics and censorship newsgroups, creating a discursive fatberg of circular arguments, bad spellings and endless stacked indentations that carried on for months, each pointless new post dutifully retrieved and downloaded by your 28kbps modem.

Music forums offered a solution to all this, or seemed to. They were public, so anyone could jump in, but also bounded and – in theory – moderated. Many had their beginnings in a specific webzine – Drowned in Sound and Popjustice, for instance, set up forums using cheap or free bulletin-board software, and found that readers were desperate to join in the conversation. Others were set up to discuss particular topics or labels and expanded, some adding music talk later. Barbelith had its roots in the countercultural comics work of Grant Morrison, for instance. And some emerged in response to the perceived faults of existing sites – the late cultural critic Mark Fisher helped set up Dissensus in reaction to the cosiness he saw on other forums, while Hipinion became a backchannel for grudgeful indie journos.

Sound of the underground ... acts such as Girls Aloud were given due deference on niche forums such as Popjustice. Photograph: Polydor Records/PA

Each board had a somewhat different culture and taste. When critic Kelefa Sanneh wrote a New York Times article on “rockism”, a tendency of critics to assess music by how closely it conformed to the expressive, album-length virtues of the guitar rock canon, he drew on sprawling arguments from the I Love Music forum. Sanneh’s piece has been sparking tetchy rebuttals for 15 years. But on ILM itself the accusation of rockism was mostly a tactical ploy, a half-joking way to nudge conversation on to something less predigested than Astral Weeks or the Clash.

There was, after all, a whole world of music to hear. The rise of music forums took place alongside the rise of the mp3. For a while, until label crackdowns put paid to it, most threads would be studded with YouSendIt or MediaFire links for new tracks. They were places to find out what new music had leaked online, and to hear it communally, bouncing reactions and ideas off each other.

These moments were music forums at their best, communities delighting in the hobby they loved. When an anticipated record emerged, threads would become a blizzard of instant reactions, jokes, theories, wild hyperbole and friendly argument. When I think of the giddy high points of early 00s pop – from Beyoncé’s Crazy in Love to the Knife’s Heartbeats – that surge of discussion is inseparable from the music and the dancing, all part of the excitement. A forum might collectively elevate some barely known newcomer, such as Annie, into a cult figure, or cling to its darlings long after the industry had given up on them; deep down, I’m still waiting for one-hit R&B wonder Cassie to get her due. And not every bet paid off. The last the world saw of country duo Big & Rich, lauded by ILM for 2003’s Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy) they were playing at Trump’s Great America Alliance inauguration gala.

For fans who had grown up reading the music press, unable to talk back, the chance to add to the babble was irresistible. It was also very modish. The early 00s heyday of music forums coincided with a wider buzz for the ideas of “online communities” and “the conversation”. “Markets are conversations”, proclaimed hip business book The Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999, helping to popularise the idea of the internet as a kind of digital souk, full of vibrant haggling, where opportunity lurked in every interaction. What people really wanted, the theory went, was to talk to brands, and to talk to each other about brands.

This idea flattered big corporations, who were keen to get involved. In 2001, for instance, Procter & Gamble launched Toejam – Teens Openly Expressing Just About Me, a community designed to let teenagers “express themselves as members of their generation”. The firm’s previous attempt, Swizzle, closed when its members unaccountably rejected wholesome talk about brands and expressed themselves openly in sex chat and cyberbullying.

Record labels, locked into an attritional battle with file-sharing and fearful of the web, preferred not to jump the Cluetrain. Sony and Universal had no interest in launching Toejams of their own. That helped give the music forums a niche. But the issues that bedevilled corporate forums affected the independent ones, too. There was trolling, stalking, abuse and fakery – the now familiar downside of online interaction.

‘Spotify – anyone heard of it?’ ... The top discussion topics on the I Love Music forum, 28 May 2018. Photograph: Screengrab

The culture of any internet platform grows out of what its users do and care about, but their behaviour is also guided by limits and defaults baked into the technology. What the platform lets its users do is important, but just as important is what the platform lets its moderators stop. And with the off-the-shelf bulletin board software that drove most music forums, admins had less power than they liked to pretend. On I Love Music, we would talk about banning unruly users, but had no ability to do anything but delete individual posts. Any really determined abuser could get around whatever limits we imposed. To be a moderator was to wake up and find threads on pop bands flooded overnight with Japanese enema pics, or wearily deal with a new troll whose gimmick was pretending to be a werewolf.

Music forums aligned themselves with the libertarian spirit of the pre-social media internet, the idea that open discussion was always a good, and that online communities would police themselves. That attitude was partly ideological, partly naive, and ultimately wrong, but it was also pragmatic. Given the real limits of what admins could do with the technology and time they had, they were always likely to lean towards being permissive.

For a while, it worked. The forums were small and friendly enough to become virtual communities, happy to pick up electronic litter and give undesirables a wide berth. They developed their own habits and in-jokes – a gif of French pop star Alizée, or a picture of rapper Ma$e, used as proto-memes. They spawned offline meet-ups, where adults would awkwardly introduce one another as DJ Martian or the Pinefox. People came for the music and stayed for the friendship. This sense of belonging, like the passion for argument, is something music forums had learned from the old pop press, where part of the trick of Smash Hits or the NME was making readers feel they were part of a secret gang. Now you could hang out with the gang all day. But as the focus of online life shifted to Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, the music forums faded. Conviviality wasn’t an accidental by-product of these new platforms, it was their fuel.

‘Making readers feel they were part of a secret gang’ ... The print music press of yore. Photograph: Richard Saker for the Observer

But perhaps their time will come again. Hip-hop discussion board Kanyetothe endures, as does the forum connected to audio engineer Steve Hoffman’s website. The social element of music is something streaming services have barely tried to exploit. Yes, your friends’ playlists drive your Spotify recommendations, but there’s no real way to geek out about them to one another, let alone meet new enthusiasts. The current experience of streaming is great at zooming in on you as an individual, or subsuming you into a vast playlisted datamass. It can replicate a record collection or the radio. But the middle ground between individual and mass – the small groups of friends who could thrill to or fight about new music – is entirely neglected.

Many of the forums I’ve mentioned still exist, trundling along, quieter and more insular now, with a trickle of newcomers at best. And if music forums do come back, it’ll be to a less naive internet, one that recognises the problems of online platforms and how easily “conversation” can be a cover for harassment and abuse. Having experienced the venomous entitlement of fan mobs or self-proclaimed nerds, it’s hard to be hopeful about the prospects for geeky subcultural spaces. Encouragingly, patten’s 555-5555 board understands the issue – it proclaims a zero-tolerance for racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.

I hope they get it right: the music forums succeeded in being places for music lovers to thrive, but they were never as welcoming or diverse as I had hoped they would be when I set one up. Running one, I eventually learned the lesson Twitter, Facebook and other platforms are struggling with: good intentions are never enough. Left to its own devices, any online community, whether small or huge, will reflect the society it’s built in. Making something better takes effort and intervention.